We used to play this collection on lots of LAN-parties back in the day, and loved to browse these now very old and often ugly maps.
If you were a gamer at the time you will have no problem reminiscing about the old days and you will feel even older if you read the hardware requirements of “IBM PC, 16MB RAM, Windows 9x, SVGA 640x480/16 bit, Mouse”.
Origin:
These maps were collected from all kinds of now long gone websites and publishing something like this for money today might get one in all kinds of legal trouble.
But selling content pulled from the internet and other media was easy in the “early wild west internet times”.
And in this case even got them shelf-space on most large retailer chains in Europe, where I got mine from as well.
That's probably why it has no legal notice or imprint of any kind, not even a country or year, just a hideous “X Media Publishing” logo that screams nineties.
ISBN-search didn’t find anything, but MobyGames assumes the UK as country of origin and a release year of 2001, which seems about right, though I have seen a german email address as well on their homepage.
I even recall browsing this short lived website “modsandmaps.com”, but had no luck on the internet archive these days, maybe I just misremembered.
Like with other additional content for age-restricted games, it was technically not a game, just some map files.
So no age rating necessary, even though Counter-Strike itself was age restricted in most countries to ages of 16 or 18.
Therefore it was easy to sell to young teenagers, likely the intended customers.
Content:
Of course if you want to sell it with the bold claim of “more than 1000 maps” you throw on the two CD-ROMs whatever you can find, without much interest for gameplay, quality, looks or even correct working maps, no curation whatsoever.
At least the maps are sorted in the menu-software by at the time three Counter-Strike gameplay types “cs”, “de”, “as”.
There is also “misc”, containing all kinds of broken, but sometimes fun maps and “wads”, which has lots of ".WAD" texture files for map editing.
Be careful if you want to use them directly in projects you intend to publish though (for some strange reason), the copyright and legal status of these textures is up in the air, as is basically the whole collection.
You won’t find most of these files anywhere else anymore, which makes it kind of a treasure hunt for long forgotten artifacts of early PC online-gaming.
Some of the maps are weird and fascinating to walk through. Sure, they were made by fans and not professionals and some look like they are made from very young mappers or at least inexperienced ones.
It's also an interesting resource if you are curious about things like "uncanny architecture" or "liminal spaces" way before these terms existed.
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